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Ledger asked to be beaten

If the fight between Batman and the Joker in the interrogation rooms looks realistic, that's because it was.

Bale told The Independent that Ledger actually encouraged him to be rough.

"In the movie, Batman starts beating The Joker and realises that this is not your ordinary foe," Bale said.

"The more I beat him, the more he enjoys it; and Heath was kinda egging me on, going, 'Go on, go on, go on!' But he was slamming himself around, and there were tiled walls inside of that set which were cracked and dented. His commitment was total."

Speaking about the same scene, director Christopher Nolan said to Hero Complex: "They had rehearsed the stunts and the fight stuff very specifically, but we really let the actors work within that. I had never seen anybody sell a punch the way Heath was able to with Christian. I got the violence I wanted."

Batman never rode the batpod

The Batpod, which is basically an anti-aircraft gun on two wheels, is so difficult to drive that only one man was allowed to get behind the wheel.

"The guy who did ride it in the film, Jean-Pierre Goy, was the only guy, out of dozens of bike champs and stunt men on set, who could actually stay on the damn thing for any length of time," Bale said to GQ.

"Embarrassingly, I didn't get to ride it. There are other motorbikes in the film that I got to burn about on, but not the Batpod - it was deemed too dangerous; they needed me in one piece to finish the damn movie."

It turns out that man is actually US Senator Patrick Leahy who is such a DC Comics fan that he's appeared in five different Batman movies.

"He (Heath Ledger) scared the heck out of me with the knife," Leahy said to Roll Call, "I didn't have to act."

The Senator from Vermont was extremely impressed with Ledger's performance on set: "We'd be sitting around the chow line or whatnot and he's just joking with everybody, then they'd say 'Action,' he'd turn into this, very, very menacing person."

Patrick Leahy also appeared in this year's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Was the real hero actually The Joker?

"Entire sections of the city were closed off due to madness, organised crime ran rampant, and the majority of important city officials were wildly corrupt. The city even tolerated a renegade vigilante who ran around wearing a rubber suit.

"Along comes the Joker and by the end of a very short time, almost all organised crime was eliminated, many corrupt officials were imprisoned or dead, and the city's vigilante even went into hiding for eight years. This was all part of Joker's masterfully executed plan."

"The very first thing we see Joker do is rob a mafia controlled bank, eliminating the entire team of expert bank robbers who helped him pull it off," wrote generalzee.

The Joker then begins "murdering key criminals and corrupt officials that could help insulate those at the top".

"Gordon's promotion, too, did a major service to Gotham. I think a lot of people take the Joker's clapping during Gordon's promotion scene to be sarcastic, but I actually think that Joker believed in Gordon, one of the few officers on the force who was truly incorruptible."

In conclusion, the Reddit user argued that "Gotham was safe because the Joker had cleaned up the streets".

"He eliminated the corrupt police, he destroyed organised crime financially, he uplifted Gotham's spirit, and he even got rid of the flying pest that had been corrupting Gotham ever since he declared himself its protector."